OK, Espoo here we come. Matt, Joe and I are now booked on to flights to Helsinki. We arrive on 10 August and leave on 13 August.

We also now have accomodation at a rather nice (and very pine) hotel in Espoo near the con.

Eero Tuovinen and Sami Koponen have arranged some things for us on the Finnish side and so we will be demoing games, taking part in design activities and seminars. All good.

It will be great to meet up with Emily Care Boss and Robin Laws too.

JoE and myself are committing (should be committed?) to go to Finland the weekend before GenCon Indy.

(Luckily for JoE he won't have to go to Indy on the Wednesday... no such luck for me!)

We're goping to hook up with Sami Kopponen, who I met at WarpCon in Cork, and it should be fun with Robin D. Laws and Emily Care Boss there too.

So, does anyone want us to represent any of their stuff in .fi?

I'm waiting to hear back from Sami, but I figure it might be a chance for me to test B-movie, say, and the DoN demos for a start...

Over on enworld Matt Sprange from Mongoose posted his annual State of the Industry and made some interesting observations about the industry in the UK and Europe:

In the USA. What was once an 80% share in our business has shrunk to something like 55-60%. However, not all is doom and gloom, as this has been matched (even exceeded) by a growing tide in Europe and the UK, where we have seen both RPGs and miniatures games experience a sharp rise, to the point where even relatively small UK distributors have leapfrogged most of those in America. The second largest distributor (in terms of Mongoose sales) is in the UK, and is nipping at the heels of the Number One in America. My first prediction for 2007 is the Rise of Europe. Americans – you are letting your side down! You cannot have us Brits be the centre of roleplaying! Start playing more!